Gravitational Pull: A blog about tech and other stuff.

  • Lo hicimos, Lo hicimos — we did it

    Sunday night we put together the spare parts and made a new PC, a Shuttle XPC, actually. As I explained the other day, it’s made with loose ends, bits of the old MSI-based Windows 2000 system and bargains picked up around town for about $400. For the record, it’s based on an Intel Celeron D…

  • Sony’s promising Mylo gets a poor review

    I was intrigued by Sony’s announcement of a $350 mini portable device, Mylo, that could browse the web and play multimedia files. But the first review is in, by Tim Onosko, on Dave Farber’s Interesting People list and couldn’t be more negative: “Mylo, in my opinion, is a classic case of overpromising and underdelivering. It…

  • Getting ready to upgrade the Windows 2K box

    A little less than a year ago, I scrounged up some spare parts and built an AMD Sempron 64-based PC running Windows 2000. It used a bare bones case by MSI which was so loud and slouchy that I got sick of it. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve again searched high and low…

  • Ribbons of chaos flummox even Word lovers

    I’m not a big fan of scifi author and computer columnist Jerry Pournelle these days due to his politics, his abrasiveness and his clouded approach to reviewing new stuff. I used to like his lengthy columns for Byte magazine in print because he was one of the only people back then with some attitude, some…

  • Screen size and battery life boost for iPods?

    I have to say that today’s Steve Jobs announcements left me less than thrilled. iPods didn’t get bigger screens, my main desire, and why would I pay for a cheesy, low resolution downloaded movie when I can buy a DVD for almost the same price and rip my own cheesy version? And iTV sounds great…

  • Why I got such a good deal on my Canon Rebel XT

    Canon introduced an update to its top-selling digital SLR today, according to the Digital Photography Review web site. The main new features seem to be a slightly bigger and brighter LCD, 10.1 megapixels instead of 8 and some kind of automatic lens dust cleaner. Can’t say there’s much there to make me sad I moved…

  • Netgear’s switching gear just works

    With most of the computers in the house able to network via ethernet at gigabit speeds, I’ve used a Linksys gigabit router to connect them. It doesn’t affect web surfing speed, which is constrained by the much slower cable modem, but it’s great for backing up files from one computer to another (someday my NAS…

  • New gadget blog sounds promising

    I’ve grown quite tired of the current crop of gadget blogs which seem all to focused on the People-magazination or something of new tech gear. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, a site following Web 2.0 news, has expanded his stable with a new gadget blog, dubbed logically enough Crunchgear. It sounds promising as Mike seems to…

  • Finally, an EVDO card for Expresscard/34 slots

    After eight months of waiting and delays, Verizon Wireless has finally announced a new wireless broadband card that can fit in the bizarro world Expresscard/34 slot of the nearly-new Macbook Pro. The Novatel V640 will cost $180 with a “new” two-year agreement and $230 with a “new” one year agreement but no word in the…

  • Wow, 10.4.7 sees my Verizon Novatel card

    I’ve been successfully using a Verizon wireless broadband card (the Novatel v620 pc card) since April in my Powerbook thanks to a software hack from the good folk at the EVDO Info web site. It basically made the Novatel card look like any other modem, showing up on a pull down list on my menu…

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